Court pick puts McCain in hot seat

A telltale sign that John McCain has unofficially launched his second presidential campaign is the promotion of his new book, ''Character is Destiny."

Just as the 2000 race began heating up, the Arizona senator published ''Faith of My Fathers," praised for its nonself-promotional, ''heartfelt reflection on war and naval culture," as Publishers Weekly put it. Last week, with '08 on the horizon, McCain was out peddling his new compilation of morality tales for children, coauthored with top aide Mark Salter.

But the Supreme Court nomination of conservative Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. on Monday abruptly changed that subject, once again putting McCain on the hot seat with the political right, where he will need to find some support to win a presidential primary.

Conservatives have plenty of reason to distrust McCain -- from his 2000 condemnation of the religious right to his support for overhauling campaign finance laws. Now they're poised to blame him -- and his leadership of the so-called Gang of 14 -- if Democrats move to filibuster Alito.

''McCain is clearly attempting to take the edge off the hostility that has existed between him and conservatives over the last six years," David Keene, the president of American Conservative Union, told us. ''But if you're McCain and you're trying to lower the temperature, you are facing a real test right now."

McCain's bipartisan group has proclaimed that a filibuster should be employed only in ''extraordinary circumstances." But conservatives want dramatic action to prevent a Democratic filibuster. Already, two GOP members of the group, Mike DeWine of Ohio and Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina, have declared that they will vote to eliminate the filibuster rather than see Democrats deploy it.

If McCain -- one of the few GOP senators who openly oppose a ''nuclear option" vote to ban filibusters against judicial nominees -- fails to stop a Democratic blockade, ''he'd slam the door on conservative support for good, and McCain can ill-afford to do that," Keene warned.

After a group meeting Thursday, members emerged with a wait-and-see message. McCain said he is ''favorably disposed toward" Alito, but he told reporters that ''the process that we set up, the 14 of us, is going to be followed, and that's periodic meetings and evaluations."

Conservatives are not only suspicious of McCain, whom Keene considers the '08 GOP front-runner, they also fear him. ''People are afraid that he'd want to drive them out of the party and remake it in his own image," Keene said.

But Marshall Wittmann, who holds the unique twin credentials of former Christian Coalition organizer and onetime McCain strategist, insisted the conservative movement is already moving in the senator's direction, embracing his longtime concerns over federal spending and the Iraq war.

''In many ways the movement is coming to him," Wittmann said. ''There is glasnost."

Two weeks ago, McCain spoke at The Heritage Foundation, where former colleagues once ridiculed Wittmann for his ''McCainiac" credentials. McCain's speech, billed as a ''frank and sobering assessment of the federal government's unsustainable spending spree," was warmly received.

On Thursday, the senator joins a parade of Democratic '08 prospects with his own ''major address" on Iraq -- at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Vote tally finds Kerry a hit at home

With last week marking the one-year anniversary of the 2004 presidential campaign, we turned to political analyst Rhodes Cook, who has been mining the data, for some value-added insights on the final vote tally.

Cook calculated the Kerry vote in nine communities he labeled ''liberal resorts and artists' colonies" -- from Aspen and Telluride, Colo., to Jackson, Wyo. -- and the winner was: Massachusetts' own Provincetown, where 87 percent of the vote went to the Democratic senator.

The most Democratic academic center in the nation was Cambridge, with 85 percent of the vote for Kerry, followed closely by Amherst (84 percent) and Northampton (80 percent). Hanover, N.H., home to Dartmouth College, trailed at 77 percent.

''Massachusetts, along with the rest of New England, is probably more staunchly Democratic at the presidential level now than it was a generation or a half generation ago," said Cook, who publishes a bimonthly newsletter.

''When JFK ran in 1960, he carried Massachusetts with 60 percent of the vote. Dukakis won it in 1988 with 53 percent. Kerry took the state with 62 percent last fall," Cook said.

He added, ''Kerry's winning percentage was the highest for any presidential candidate in Massachusetts, Democratic or Republican, since Hubert Humphrey swamped Richard Nixon in 1968 with 63 percent of the vote."

Donations to help DeLay pour in

Former House majority leader Tom DeLay has more to celebrate than the removal of a Democratic judge from his criminal campaign-spending trial in Texas.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, dollars are pouring into DeLay's legal defense fund. Between July 1 and Sept. 30, he collected $318,020 from more than 70 individuals and 35 corporations and political action committees.

''This represents a huge leap over the first two quarters of 2005," the center concluded.